Fox Gone Wild

When one is in the business of correcting conservative misinformation, one spends a great deal of time watching Fox News Channel -- America's foremost purveyor of conservative misinformation.

After many thousands of hours of viewing Fox News' stable of anchors, correspondents, and spinmeisters, one begins to see patterns emerge in FNC's programming: on-screen text that bashes Democrats, reporters adopting White House terminology, etc. But after a while, the din of GOP talking points and anti-liberal screeds slowly fade and an altogether different pattern emerges.

A person idly watching Fox News all day, for example, has an excellent chance of glancing at the screen and seeing some partial nudity or a male Fox News personality hitting on a female colleague on the air. Scantily clad women and on-air sexual harassment are the orders of the day over at Fox News Channel.

Take, for instance, Fox News' premier business news program, Your World with Neil Cavuto. Cavuto, Fox News' vice president of business news and the worst James Bond since Timothy Dalton, regularly shows footage of Victoria's Secret runway models and Playboy bunnies -- presumably in the name of business.

Cavuto also has a special obsession with a certain football game played every year in early February: the Lingerie Bowl. Last February, Cavuto interviewed two Lingerie Bowl contenders in their -- ahem -- uniforms. As the News Hounds blog pointed out at the time, this interview was preceded by a one-on-one with Focus on the Family's James C. Dobson, who said that parents must monitor what their children are "looking at because pornography is everywhere, as you [Cavuto] know."

This year, Cavuto switched things up a bit and interviewed just one backfield beauty (in a slightly less revealing outfit) opposite the considerably less attractive, though certainly voluptuous, William "The Refrigerator" Perry.

Cavuto's special love for the Lingerie Bowl is shared by others in the Fox News family. This year, anchor Jon Scott had the pleasure of interviewing a pair of "uniformed" Lingerie Bowl representatives on Feb. 3. Snippets of that interview were later replayed during a straight news report on the game, which also featured some footage of the athletes stretching, bouncing, gyrating and participating in other activities clearly intended to balance cardiovascular health with rhythmic jiggling.

When not reporting on the Lingerie Bowl, Fox News was busy reporting on the partially nude aspects of the Super Bowl itself. Every year Fox sends sports reporter and terrorism expert Brian Kilmeade to the Super Bowl host city to provide in-depth, "on the ground" reports. This year's coverage from Detroit dealt substantially with the Playboy party, of which Kilmeade gushed on the Feb. 5 edition of Fox & Friends Sunday: "I've never seen so many women wearing so little."

Luckily, for those of us who are not Brian Kilmeade, Fox News dutifully aired footage from the party, allowing everybody to see so many women wearing so little, including a shot of a stripped-down model on a swing. Kilmeade later went on to describe how much "work" one must do in covering the Playboy party: "You might as well be covering a robbery or a mall opening … and, like, you know, certain times women are above you, sometimes they're below, and you don't know. You have to be flexible." So true, Brian, so true.

But Fox doesn't need the Super Bowl as an excuse to air racy footage. On the Feb. 14 edition of Fox News Live, anchor Bill Hemmer discussed "perhaps the true signal for spring … supermodels posing for the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue." Accompanied by footage of eight models walking in bikinis down the beach and posing, Hemmer noted: "the 2006 issue hitting newsstands today, and features eight beauties on the cover. … I don't think they've ever done eight before."